indicated in a coded telephone exchange with a fellow signals of-
ficer in Berlin that “something terrible” had happened and that the
Führer was alive but gave no further details. One of the first persons
to be arrested, he was sentenced to death on 8 August and hanged
at Plötzensee Prison on 4 September. The Bundeswehr barracks in
Pöking (Bavaria) were named in his honor after the war.FELTEN, PETER (1943– ). A journalist who worked for the
Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), Peter Felten was based
in Cologne at the Kölnische Rundschau and began his undercover
collaboration in 1974. Four years later, responding to a classified ad-
vertisement placed in various West German newspapers, Felten (code
name lese) established contact with the Verwaltung Aufklärung
(VA) and agreed to a meeting in East Berlin. His detailed report to
the BfV afterward noted that the VA would remunerate him for mili-
tary information related to the rearmament of the Federal Republic of
Germany. Yet when Felten’s dossier (code name herne) underwent
a parallel investigation by the VA and the Ministerium für Staatssi-
cherheit, counterintelligence officials of both agencies confirmed his
tie to the BfV. After delivering bogus information for several months,
Felten was arrested at a meeting in East Berlin and sentenced to 12
years in prison. In 1981, he was exchanged for Christel Guillaume,
wife of the “chancellor spy” Günter Guillaume.
FEUERSTEIN, DIETER (1955– ). A West German engineer who ac-
quired key military technology for the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung
(HVA), Dieter Feuerstein was born in Neu-Ulm (Bavaria), the son
of covert operatives for the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
His parents not only cultivated his early communist convictions
but helped secure his recruitment as an agent in 1974 (code name
petermann). Feuerstein’s study of aeronautical engineering in
West Berlin—undertaken specifically at the HVA’s insistence—led
to an appointment at the large military manufacturing firm of
Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm in 1983. There he had access to the
planning and construction of fighter aircraft such as the Tornado
and Jaeger 90. Hundreds of filmed pages were thus conveyed to the
HVA via a toter Briefkasten, or dead drop, on GDR-bound trains,
supplemented by regular meetings with his instructor and control
106 • FELTEN, PETER